MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Chilean President forms Commission to solve Mapuche crisis

The Commission will have to deal with the return of ancestral lands to the indigenous people

Chilean President Gabriel Boric Font set up a Commission for Peace and Understanding to lay the “foundations for a lasting and sustainable solution to the long-standing intercultural conflict between the Chilean State and the Mapuche people,” it was announced Wednesday in Santiago during the National Day of Indigenous Peoples holiday.

The Commission is made up of eight representatives from different political sectors, it was explained.

”Today we are presenting the Presidential Commission for Peace and Understanding that we announced in November 2022 in Villarrica (southern Chile) and I have the hope, the conviction, that through broad social dialogue it will lay the foundations for a lasting and sustainable solution to the long-standing intercultural conflict between the Chilean State and the Mapuche people,“ said Boric from the Palacio de La Moneda.

”It is important to have State policies, not Government policies, which allow to solve the conflict and have a wide social and political support,“ he added.

”We are aware that the road to great agreements and changes is a road that will be long and laborious and the fruits of these decisions will not be immediate,“ he went on.

In addition to the Commission, work in the southern part of the country will be focused on three axes: dialogue, investments, and improving the situation of insecurity, Boric also pointed out.

The President also underlined the ”strengthening of the police and [the]ending [to] the feeling of impunity, as well as taking care of something that is very painful, which is the reparation to the victims.“

”That is why I am convinced that this path we have proposed for peace and understanding will create the conditions that will allow for greater security, more investment, and, in short, the take-off of development that will translate into progress and good living”, said the President.

The Commission is made up of Alfredo Moreno, a former minister in Sebastián Piñera's government; Francisco Huenchumilla (Christian Democracy), senator for La Araucanía; Carmen Gloria Aravena (Republicans), senator for La Araucanía; Gloria Callupe, in charge of Native Peoples of the Regional Government of Biobío; Emilia Nuyado (Socialist Party), deputy for Los Lagos; Sebastián Naveillán, president of the Farmers' Association; Adolfo Millabur, ex-convenor and former mayor of Tirúa; and Juan Pablo Lepín, chief of staff of the Governor of La Araucanía.

The Commission will seek to address one of the main demands of the Mapuche people, which has to do with the historical demand for the return of ancestral lands to the indigenous people.

In the last public account, the President told the Parliament that this Commission “will have to register the ancestral lands claimed by Mapuche communities”, as well as to propose “to the country concrete mechanisms, with established deadlines, that will make it possible to repair this historical debt by addressing the root of the conflict and identifying at the same time which lands cannot be returned.”